Ryan Benjamin | Leaving a note, at the Facebook wall

The information age has brought new technologies that enrich our lives, but with it comes a series of ethical questions, none more avoidable than the issue of how to deal with death. Penn has experienced the deaths of three students this school year, a bit more than usual perhaps. And the way students treat death on sites like Facebook is, well, both new and up for considerable debate.

When older folks die, they tend not to have personal Web sites or any kind of online memory that can live perpetually in cyberspace. But now that we have MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and the like, we can basically say that our profiles are personal Web sites. And when people die, their profiles live on. Coupled with the rarity of deaths among teenagers and young adults - which are so tragic - the emotions involved are quite raw.

The recent untimely death of Engineering sophomore Ryan Smith produced an outpouring of support on his Facebook profile. Friends and family have left wall posts ranging from a simple "Rest in Peace" to humorous childhood anecdotes.

I suppose we can compare this to leaving a note at someone's grave or even giving a eulogy, all open to the public. And joining a Facebook Group in remembrance is sort of like a donation to a foundation. But some people aren't so sure these practices are appropriate.

"I personally think it's kind of creepy," said College senior Jennifer Ball. "On one hand, I guess it's nice for friends of the person to say they miss him or her. But it's also just strange."

I'll admit a site like Mydeathspace.com - which among other features has a map of the last 100 MySpace members who have died - is a little unnerving. But maybe one day our whole lives will exist in virtual communities, so you could say this is a sneak peek.

Because we're treading new water, we haven't formed a consensus about the issue of online reaction to death. Even Facebook's official policy on the matter is quite ambiguous and hands-off: "When we are notified that a user has died, we will generally, but are not obligated, to keep the user's account active under a special memorialized status for a period of time determined by us to allow other users to post and view comments."

Though filled with some legal jargon, this policy explicitly leaves out how the site deals with negative "RIP" wall posts that cross the line, which is not uncommon.

"It should be evident that because the memorial exists as an open Facebook group on the Internet, anyone is open to join the group and post content," College senior Lauren Mancuso, who researched the online death phenomenon for a class last year, said.

In one instance, the free-for-all resulted in some pretty shameless comments. "Yeah, Let's make this Jackass seem like some kind of a hero," one person wrote about another who was killed in a car crash. (And these are not anonymous. The Juicy Campus version of this is much worse.)

In full disclosure, I wrote on a friend's wall when he passed away, and I have joined multiple RIP groups on Facebook. It's more spur of the moment than anything else, a way to show a friend you care even though you know he'll never see it, a kind of catharsis.

I'd never crossed paths with College senior Kambili Moukwa, but when he died I discovered we had mutual friends. In this case, the awkwardness of reacting to the death of a community member in real life was more compounded on Facebook.

I understand why it seems bizarre to write comments on Facebook walls, but film, literature and religion tell us in various ways that though the physical body may have passed, the spirit lives on forever. That understanding used to be more of a coping mechanism than anything else.

But with Facebook, a profile becomes the online embodiment of the soul and physically morphs whenever someone writes on a wall. It's as close as we can get to a living spirit, and so I say yes, keep writing, keep remembering, and eventually we'll get over the creepiness of it all.

Ryan Benjamin is a College senior from New Haven, Conn. A Connecticut Yankee appears on Fridays. His email address is benjamin@dailypennsylvanian.com

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